Strangelights

Another tech blog.

For Functional Programming eXchange 2012 and I’ve tried to put together a programming that mixes the best the functional programming community has to give. I wanted both talks that show how functional programming languages can be used more effectively and that show off new up and coming language and new language features. I also wanted talks that gave feedback from project that were implemented using functional languages. I’m pleased to say we have plenty of both.

The day will kick off with David Pollak talking about Visi.Pro. One of the areas I’ve been thinking about a lot lately, outside of functional programming, is how tablets will affect the way we work. Clearly up take in the consumer market it is growing, and the new fashion of “Bring your own device” meet that tablets are making there way into the enterprise. But can people do useful work with these new devices? And if so how will they do it? David has come up an interesting answer, he’s betting that to make effective use of these new devices we need a new way to program them and has come up with the visi.io language and the visi.pro platform to help people create software and models using their iPads. If you care about trends in the tech industry, definitely one to watch.

Next we have 3 cases studies that show how Haskell, F# and Scala have been used to build complex real world application. First up Erik Hesselink will be talking about “SilkApp” a web application for help users to visual data in a more structured way, then Loic Denuziere will talk about creating the site fpish.net a large complex community site written in F# using WebShaper, finally Kevin Wright will talk about using AKKA to create a high-throughput and low latency RESTful/streaming event service at zeebox.

In the afternoon will see some more theoretical talks that’ll shows us how functional programming can be applied more effectively. First Andres Löh will talk about creating DSLs in Haskell, then Tomas Petricek will talk about F# 3.0’s new feature, Type Providers, Miles Sabin will talk about advanced uses of Scala and Bruce Durling will round of the day with an overview of Clojure and Incanter, clojure’s powerful data visualization library.

And if that wasn’t enough there’ll be chance to meet and socialize with our speakers and other FPX delegates all day along and quite possibly all evening long in the pub afterwards.

UPDATE: Just occurred to me I didn’t put a link into the full agenda, so here it is.